Tobacco Mosaic Virus Summary

Review of The Life of a Virus

The life-threatening, smallpox-causing, flu-epidemic-causing, and poorly understood particulates found in our daily lives - viruses - have such a negative connotation. All viruses are not bad, though. Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) is one such virus. It cannot even infect humans, and yet it is so vital to our understanding of viruses that do have human hosts. The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 pits TMV as the primary model organism for the entire field of early molecular biology (and thus biochemistry) and plant-based virology. Angela N. H. Creager manages to achieve this lofty goal through examples, biographies, and communications between scientists of the time period

This piece is more of a history of TMV and its uses. Modern techniques would not be appropriate. The goal is not to portray each aspect of TMV or to describe every inkling we have learned very recently. Creager uses the scientific modes of the time period in which she is describing - 1930-1965. She identifies the use of ultracentrifugation, the first isolation of TMV, and some of the first uses of electrophoresis. Each of these techniques has been greatly altered since the mid-20th century. That is not the point, however. As a History professor, it is logical for Creager to use contemporary models to evaluate other contemporary models, like

I am very proud that a company with such technology is working out of my hometown. I have visited the facility before and seen all the tobacco they grow there (way before they were focusing on ebola, though). The facility has recently turned to solely pumping out ebola treatments due to the lack of drugs available. This article may seem relatively unrelated to The Life of a Virus, and it may have nothing to do with tobacco mosaic virus. The two are very interrelated though. All of the studies of TMV, and how to efficiently produce it for studies, gleaned knowledge on how to grow the tobacco plant (the host) as efficiently as possible. Just as TMV became a model organism, so has the tobacco plant itself. And now the experimental models from decades ago are combining with recent knowledge of the ebola virus to form a platform of study on treatments for